Teaching Literacy in Physical Education

Articles

My Focus and Why

Teacher's focus needs to be on creating desire to read

Creating value-why should they care?

Authentic Literacy-bring reading into real life

Give ownership opportunities

The only way to increase support of Physical Education is to increase traditional academic content

Encouraging literacy in all fields will increase effectiveness

How to apply this to my field

Give options in class

Promote reading

Assign literacy projects

Share personal experience

Allow for group discussion

Bring in guests

Observation

I taught a lesson about Track and Field for my Secondary Physical Education Class.

The class was 50 minutes and conducted at Madison Central High School.

Motivation Checklist

Create Value:

Teacher explains why content is important

Teacher allows students to speculate/discuss why content is important

Teacher explains/displays benefits of content

Authentic learning/literacy:

Teacher connects content to student's lives

Teacher aids students in connecting material to student's lives

Teacher shows student how to use content in student's lives

Teacher encourages students to construct new meanings about content

Give ownership:

Teacher allows students to experience multiple viewpoints

Teacher affords students the opportunity to make choices within content

Teacher allows content to suit student culture

Tracking motivation in my teaching

Create value: Ask prior knowledge about and explain the history of track and field

Authentic learning: Olympics and ask own views and experiences with track and field

Give ownership: Stations, team creation, and event choosing for competition

Why should YOU use this?

Motivation is the key to increasing literacy.

Teacher's must consider the climate and context of the class, how students feel about their potential reading success, and why they should care.

Student's wants must be considered when trying to increase literacy.

This checklist can be used to make teaching in general more effective in any discipline.

Using Motivation to Aid Literacy

Multiple Strategies: While there may be mandated strategies for teaching literacy, different, research-based strategies have a home in every teachers repertoire.

Motivation: Motivation is the untapped key to increasing literacy in all ages and demographics. If a teacher can find what motivated the students to learn and tie that back to literacy building activities, students will want to read.

Student Involvement: Ownership in the reading will increase a willingness to participate. Give students options, find forms of literature that are course and age appropriate that also interest them, and help them connect the themes in the reading to their everyday lives.

Teacher Efficacy: Be aware of the strategies you are learning about and using. This means that teachers need to take ownership of their craft and hone their skills in order to provide the best education for their students, whether teaching content area material or literacy within the content area.